


Dark Twin

by threewalls



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Canonical Character Death, Community: trope_bingo, Gen, Spoilers, Twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-09 23:19:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/779114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/pseuds/threewalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabranth is dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Twin

**Author's Note:**

> Written with thanks to lynndyre for reading over multiple drafts of this and helping me make more sense of what I wanted to say.
> 
> Written for trope_bingo: "secret twin/doppelganger".

A handful of float motes from Vaan hurry up the task of transporting Noah's broken body from the battlegrounds of Bahamut to the bay where they left the Strahl. "I've been carrying these around for so long," he says. "Never thought I'd actually get to use them!"

No one asks why it is the children who run alongside Noah's body, Vaan and Penelo, or why Basch himself is not shouldering his brother's weight.

In the Strahl, Balthier is as quickly in the cockpit as he is gone, and Fran in his wake. Some technical problem whose details escape Basch. He is not an engineer, and the question of whether this ship can be made to fly are more crucial than what they might all hope to be needless words of farewell.

It is only Basch behind the cockpit, Noah, laid out on one of the Strahl's bunks, and Larsa Solidor, a child who remains the sole heir to Archades' military might. They hold the heirs to the thrones of Dalmasca and the Archadian empire on this little skyship. If it can fly, if they survive, the war is over. Ashe will be queen, and Basch's charge is done. Perhaps that is why it is easier to contemplate what must happen next.

Noah's armour dripped as the children carried him, and drips now onto the bunk of the Strahl. He smells of metal, and the Sky Fortress Bahamut has thinned the air of Mist. 

"We have not much time."

"Look after Larsa, will you?" Noah's voice is thin. "If House Solidor should crumble, the Empire would fail, and civil war would take us all."

Basch is unused to this new Noah after so many years of brotherly chastisements, of running and being given chase, of a brother who cast him out. When ill dreams ride him, Basch still is sometimes returned to Nalbina, still in his cage and Noah nought but a voice of judgement encased in iron.

"I understand," Basch says, and he reaches for Noah's gauntlet.

Yet Noah moves his hand away, the plates of his armour grinding upon each other. His movement is slow, but the gesture is clear enough.

"Lord Larsa is our last hope."

His voice breaks, and the ship jolts. There are shouts from Vaan and Penelo at the fore, and then the ship is moving. Larsa stands with courtesy's apologies upon his lips, to join with Ashe in royal conference as they plan how the battle raging outside may be stopped.

Balthier and Fran have not returned.

Noah groans, and Basch finds himself reaching forward once more for a hand held apart from him. Even in Nalbina, Basch did not fear his own death while he beheld the enduring proof that his brother still lived. But it is different when he knows that it is Noah who is dying.

"I cannot remember when you were not my brother, even when you were but a voice in the dark."

Basch cannot remember before he was, but he can remember following after Noah's footsteps, skimming grass and paving stones, and a boy who talked to his shadow as it were his brother. When boys taunted Noah as a traitor and a weakling, Noah taunted his shadow as the fickle, faithless one, sole heir to their mother's wasting health. 

It was years before Basch thought to speak in reply. 

He had had a voice long before he had had a body that others could see, not until seventeen and Noah hissing at the night's flame-flickered darkness: if he was so convinced that the Republic's salvation could be found outside its territory, why did Basch not prove his very faithlessness by fleeing to Dalmasca?

Perhaps their mother thought him a hallucination, when she gasped and asked Noah who this other boy could be. Basch did not stay the night.

"Distance has kept us separate," Noah says.

"And metal." 

"And metal," Noah assents, at last loosening one gauntlet with the other and subsiding once more to the bunk. 

They cannot know what will happen if Noah passes first, but Basch cannot think that they have grown so far apart that they cannot rejoin, like a magnet broken in two. Or like two measure of water poured into a single vessel. They cannot know yet, but they will know soon.

Basch's hands are translucent, teal flashes in an inky haze, but that does not hamper his efforts to unbuckle Noah's other greave. It clatters on the metal floor of the Strahl. 

Someone gasps. They have an audience, and they have no time.

It feels like the static along the hairs of his arms when a Storm Elemental passes close, or when Mist pools in his hands when he calls upon a quickening. Motes of turquoise and violet flicker at the periphery of his vision, crowding closer and thicker.

"Protect him. I would entrust Larsa to no other's care."

"We will keep him from harm. For the Empire," Basch promises, "and for Dalmasca."

He fainted once, in blinding high heat (in the muggy stink) of summer in Dalmasca (Archades). It is like that again; one moment he was kneeling (lying) and the next he was crumpled on the metal floor. The girl (Penelo) has thrown a blanket on his naked body. 

"Basch?" Vaan (the boy) demands. "Basch, is it-- you've got your--" he says, touching his brow.

Basch touches the scar on his brow, Gabranth his hair shorn to the regulations of the Archadian army. He has half as many injuries as before, and twice as many memories, overlaid and interconnecting as he cannot help but try to think of who he now is. He hasn't been Noah since he was seventeen.

"I am--" he begins, but speaks no further. He stands, pulling the (ratty) blanket about him. He has two piles of clothes to choose from.

"If I might make a suggestion," Larsa speaks. "Captain fon Ronsenburg has a less than exemplary reputation in both our countries, and is widely known to be deceased."

"And Gabranth, as a judge, has authority to issue commands to the armies outside and around us." Princess Ashe sighs. "The peace needs that."

They turn to him with their decision made, as rulers do, but he cannot fault their logic. He may not be sure who he is, but he is sure of his promise to his brother (to Drace (to Vossler (Captain Azelas??)) to further the cause of peace.

"This is Judge Magister Gabranth. All quarters cease fire!"

**Author's Note:**

> This story borrows from a concept introduced in Charles de Lint's _Spirits in the Wires_ but does not quite take the concept in precisely the same direction as that book.


End file.
